Meat and Machine
by HVK
Summary: Cyborg doesn't like talking about it. He doesn't like thinking about it. That he was clinically dead on that table for just long enough. That sometimes the metal feels more natural than the flesh. That maybe Victor Stone is dead, and his memories are left in the body of a machine who doesn't know who he is anymore.


Inspired after watching Justice League War and remembering a few comments from the early issues of the New 52's Justice League that gave me ideas for an interesting alternative take on Cyborg's... humanity or else, for lack of a better word.

Disclaimer: I do not own any copyrighted materials, DC characters, or the likenesses thereof. This is purely a work of entertainment and is not done for profit of any sort.

* * *

Wonder Woman is not, at heart, a patient woman. She is a warrior, and indeed made to fight.

_Made _is the right word. She was not born in the same manner as most of her allies and friends - and indeed, _most _is probably the accurate word - and was literally molded into life. From clay she had been forged, to clay she suspected she would return when the spark of life left her at the end of all things. Yet, even so, she was trained for battles on all fields; of sword and fist, yes. Of late, she has instructed herself in the weaponry of the world outside Paradise Island; of firearms that spit lead like thunderbolts and mechanisms that bring power to those who had little to begin with. And in the company of her new pantheon, she knows better now the battles that rearrange the landscape, glorious and terrible to behold.

And she also knows the battles waged with will and perspective along, challenged and equaled by the others. She suspected that it was the meaning of word-battles to not dominate, but to come to agreement and meld viewpoints.

In her own way, she had become a counseler of sorts to her friends. She had not expected this. She wouldn't have... welcomed it, exactly. But it was a useful thing to do.

So. She sat there, and waited patiently for the hulking boy - and he was a boy, really, not quite biologically old enough to be a man, certainly too young to bear the confusions that tormented him - to gather his thoughts.

His head tilted up, and it creaked. Not like gears grinding, nothing so crude. But there was a noise, and the only word for it was _mechanical. _She had known of Hephaestus and his work since she was small; she knew well of automatons and what modern humanity called robots; even machine-beings that could think and feel and be much as any human would be.

Her friend was rather a different like of them. Nevertheless, she saw a certain kinship between him and them.

"I flatlined on that table then," Cyborg finally said, and it came out like a confession, something that he hardly dared even think about. To speak it was a victory unto itself. "I was _gone, _do you get it? I was clinically dead for a few minutes. Long time. Too long, probably." His organic eye blinked. "I don't know…"

"Know what?" Wonder Woman said, waiting for him to reach whatever thought process he had running.

He didn't say anything for a moment, staring at his hands. They flexed, smooth and clicking faintly.

"I catch myself looking in the mirror, and I blink, and it doesn't feel right. Blinking. I look at my eye, and watch muscles twitch, and it feels _wrong. _Like it's not even me there. Just some aberration that shouldn't be there. Something I should have fixed already."

He turned.

Red eye glowing faintly, steadily. Very much unlike his organic eye, faltering and afraid.

"I'm thinking, maybe Victor Stone really did die on that table."

"You speak of him as though he were someone else," Wonder Woman said.

"Yeah. I do." Cyborg stared some more at himself. "I was out on that table for too long before I came up. My brain was mostly okay, even before it got converted. Memories are just data, mostly, in the meat. Probably, if something accessed them and didn't have anything there to begin with, they'd feel like the real thing."

"Ah," Wonder Woman said, knowingly, but keeping her own counsel.

"I think maybe, the real Victor Stone _did _die on that table, and I'm a robot lugging what's left of his meat around and thinking I used to be him." Cyborg let out a gusty sigh, vibrating against components in his throat.

Wonder Woman was practical, in her own way. "Would it matter if you were?" She said simply.

A grinding creak, almost fluid like notes of music. "Say what?" He said, sharply.

"You are," she said, simply. "Whatever that is, it matters little. I didn't know Victor Stone, whether he was you or not. But I know you. So I ask you; would it really matter to _you, _here and now, if you're Victor Stone with a new lease on life… or Cyborg remembering what it was like to be weak in body and thus what its like for the humanity you protect? Would either one make you any less of a person who thinks and feels and _is?_"

"…I guess not," Cyborg said, with some reluctance, but the beginnings of the faintest smile.

"Meditate on it," she advised. "It may help."


End file.
